Tuesday, 12 February 2013

WildcattersLife along the Overthrust Belt is lonely. Four by fours withrifle racks, six packs, Willie & Waylon, Miller's & a shot can't defeat the ultimate meaning ofhaving to drive 200 miles in a different direction every morning to get to work.

Saturday Night in Gillette

At
times along the road from the mines into Gillette, Wyoming, you can
spot grazing buffalo, their heavy blunt heads dipped to the purple
sage, ignoring the 80 m.p.h. barreling of rush-hour pickups. It's that
Wyoming time warp again: the past and the future, both incongruous in
the hopelessly undiscriminating and democratic light of the present.

****Gillette at night: the motel lady replies to a request for directions downtown with a scowl.

"You don't want to go there."

"Why, what's down there?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all you'd be interested in."

In
the Center Bar, about a dozen taciturn workers and cowboys and two
longhaired Indians are lined up on stools, impassively watching reruns
of Earnie Shavers pounding on Ken Norton. On the jukebox in the
background, Waylon Jennings explains how being crazy kept him from
going insane. The lady bartender does double duty, pouring drinks and
operating a package service out of a side window with a sliding panel
of wood. Most of the faces framed when she opens the window seem
young, bare and happy-drunk. It's Friday night. Their radios are
loud.

The
bar lady turns back to the bar to talk about working through the epic,
minus 85 degree wind-chill nights and days of the winter just past.

"Oh,
and of course we had a lot of snow," she says. "The coal mines and
the oil rigs they just go on in any weather. They go right on working
with whoever shows up, shorthanded. But back in January when it got at
its worst, nobody came to work at all. So the oil people used
helicopters. First time I ever saw that happen. They flew the boys
out from Gillette in helicopters and then flew them back, just like
over in Vietnam."

The
jukebox stops playing and the talking lady's voice rings through the
bar. A cowboy elaborately disengages himself from his bar stool and
goes over to feed the jukebox money.

"Not much of a crowd," the bar lady says. "They're pullin' a lot of the rigs out of here."

"Oil people?"

"That's right. A lot of 'em are already gone. They're down in Wamsutter and Rawlins and over in South Dakota now."

"Do they come back?"

"Oh, sure, they'll be back up here in the fall." She laughs dryly.

"Oil people come and go?"

"Well,
right now the boom's starting to fade in oil, so they're lookin'
someplace else. But the coal, that's gettin' better and better.
They've got three new mines goin' up right now, big ones. You aim to
find work?"

"Could be."

"You won't have no trouble finding it around here."

****

A
two-mile-long unit train runs on a new spur down an embankment. On
the other side of the road, a dozen mule deer browse in the gentle
wooded breaks. Down the road there's an ancient log-fenced homestead.
The topsoil of the open pit mine has been dumped on both sides of the
road into giant eroded mounds. A new freeway is being built next to
the old road, along which the litter of cans and bottles is as dense as
you'd find at Coney Island.

****

Saturday
night in Gillette. The main drag's full of fair-haired kids, fat
women and guys in webbed baseball hats. The back end of a magazine and
souvenir store turns out to be a weapons depot. Big glass cases full
of Smith & Wesson .357 Magnums, Ruger .44s, Colt .45s -- some of
the biggest handguns in the movies.

Saturday
afternoon at the Center Bar is watching two Indian girls beat the
dickens out of two wildcatters in a game of nine-ball.

GilletteExecutive class townhouses are the first thing to grow out ofthe empty cliffs around Gillette since the inland sea left.The buffalo and antelope still play amid these grasslands,but they look a little diminished next to the Minoan scale of the open pit mines.

WyomingPerhaps it's because it's such a threatening spacewhat with its great expanse of unaffectionate skythat workers in this boom region travel fromjob to job with their housing intact& never further than ten feet behind them.

S.E. WyomingThe great trans-synaptic stack flashersof the coal-fired electrical generating plantsthat tower over the Badlands across the Platte Rivermay provide useful power to all the Dakotas but to the traveler they are purely retinal messengers

"The clouds steely..."

The clouds steely off over the mesa to the Eastsuggest twisters in the Badlands have taken awaywhat was owed them by the pilgrims thereand now are moving off to test the northern settlers, or were those twisters we saw merely the swirl above the tipples?

They won't be there to pay if they can help it.There's no lack of character in fleeing in the teethof the prop wash, particularly since the new type of technological thresher advances only in reverse.

Checking OutAcross this whole part of the continental tableTime falls away & all that's left is the dusty light of motels in the West thirty years ago, laughter ofwomen somewhere off in the distance, cricketsin the violet dusk & a lonely horizontalityagainst which the beast shadows of the rigs are painted.

What the Pioneers Always Wanted To Do Was ArriveWhich meant getting across the mountains aliveBut then what? You lost track of the lessonsof the journey when the beginning fell out of sightbeyond the black unreeling truck lane of eternity

Out the window it helps to sing, Goodbye to the pronghorn, &the buffalodrops his shaggy head into the unreclaimed sageunremarking our mechanized passage

Saturday Night in Gillette: extract from TC: Wyo-Booming, in Rocky Mountain Review, 1979 Poems from TC: A Short Guide to the High Plains, 1981

The Wyodak Coal Mine near Gillette, Wyoming. Long-range plans call
for massive strip-mining of the Powder River Basin and the
construction of huge power plants. One of the power plants will be
constructed at Gillette.

Cattle graze on ranch lands near the Dave Johnston power plant on the North Platte River, Wyoming

This 750-megawatt power plant, located on the North Platte River in Wyoming, is
part of the massive strip-mining development planned for the Powder
River Region

This 750-megawatt power plant, located on the North Platte River in Wyoming, is
part of the massive strip-mining development planned for the Powder
River region

The Dave Johnston Power Plant, located on the North Platte River in Wyoming

Windmill and power lines near the Dave Johnston power plant, Wyoming

Ranch in the Powder River Basin, Wyoming

Nest in prairie grasses on a ranch in the Powder River Basin, Wyoming

The Wyodak Coal Mine at Gillette, Wyoming. One of the many power plants
proposed for the Powder River Basin will be constructed here.

Butterfly and flowers at the edge of the Acme Coal Company strip mine, Sheridan, Wyoming

8 comments:

At the time we made this trip there were still a few buffalo and antelope left, and of course over by Devil's Tower the prairie dogs... but the greater share of evidence of animal life was the sight of abundant road kill everywhere we went, traffic-flattened jackrabbits, mashed-up rattlesnakes, cow skulls lining the side of the road like sugar candy heads on the Día de los Muertos.

The wind, yes... and snow blowing and drifting over the snow fences, and as the towns got closer, the occasional radio station coming in, filling all that vast empty space with the appropriate "old time" fire & brimstone American evangelism.

Speaking of visionaries, Simone Weil long ago saw industrial civilization as unstoppable, a “spreading catastrophe” which would destroy the earth and leave nothing for future generations “but a note in a bottle.”

This, perhaps, is what generations to come might find scribbled on that note:

To whom it may concern:

We took everything. What we couldn’t takewe destroyed.We left you nothing. Fuck you.Deal with it.

I sure do like that redeeming phrase from the Wyodak Coal Mine sign that says "readily recoverable"--sounds so neat and easy to extract the stuff that I guess anybody with a pick and shovel can just mosey on down there and fill his bucket to kingdom come. Too bad the landscape ain’t so readily recoverable afterwards.